The long-legged country girl—Mandy something-or-other—was a chronic early bird, she was probably already sitting on the steps outside Studio 1 with her guitar propped up beside her, but there was one thing I had to know right then. “What did you mean when you said you doubted they were wedding rings?”
“Didn’t use the rings on you, huh? When he took care of your little drug problem?”
I thought of the abandoned auto body shop. “Nope. Headphones.”
“This was in what? 1992?”
“Yes.”
“My experience with the Rev was in 1983. He must have updated his MO in the time between. He probably went back to the rings because they seem more religious than headphones. But I bet he’s moved ahead with his work since my time . . . and yours. That’s the Rev, wouldn’t you say? Always trying to take it to the next level?”
“You call him the Rev. Was he preaching when you met him?”
“Yes and no. It’s complicated. Go on, get out of here, your girl will be waiting. Maybe she’ll be wearing a miniskirt. That’ll take your mind off Pastor Danny.”
As a matter of fact, she was wearing a mini, and those legs were definitely spectacular. I hardly noticed them, though, and I couldn’t tell you a thing she sang that day without checking the log. My mind was on Charles Daniel Jacobs, aka the Rev. Now known as Pastor Danny.
• • •
Mookie McDonald bore his scolding about the soundboard quietly, head down, nodding, at the end promising he would do better. He would, too. For awhile. Then, a week or two from now, I’d come in and find the board on again in 1, 2, or both. I think the idea of putting people in jail for smoking the rope is ludicrous, but there’s no doubt in my mind that long-term daily use is a recipe for CRS, also known as Can’t Remember Shit.
He brightened up when I told him he’d be recording George Damon. “I always loved that guy!” the Mookster exclaimed. “Everything he sang sounded like—”
“Kate Smith singing ‘God Bless America.’ I know. Have a good time.”
• • •
There was a pretty little picnic area in a grove of alders behind the big house. Georgia and a couple of the office girls were having their lunch there. Hugh led me to a table well away from theirs and took a couple of wrapped sandwiches and two cans of Dr Pepper from his capacious manpurse. “Got chicken salad and tuna salad from Tubby’s. You choose.”
I chose tuna. We ate in silence for awhile, there in the shadow of the big mountains, and then Hugh said, “I also used to play rhythm, you know, and I was quite a bit better than you.”
“Many are.”
“At the end of my career I was in a band out of Michigan called Johnson Cats.”
“From the seventies? The guys who wore those Army shirts and sounded like the Eagles?”
“It was actually the early eighties when we broke through, but yeah, that was us. Had four hit singles, all off the first album. And do you want to know what got that album noticed in the first place? The title and the jacket, both my idea. It was called Your Uncle Jack Plays All the Monster Hits, and it had my very own Uncle Jack Yates on the cover, sitting in his living room and strumming his ukulele. Inside, lots of heaviness and monster fuzz-tone. No wonder it didn’t win Best Album at the Grammys. That was the era of Toto. Fucking ‘Africa,’ what a piece of crap that was.”
He brooded.
“Anyway, I was in the Cats, had been for two years, and that’s me on the breakout record. Played the first two tour dates, then got let go.”
“Why?” Thinking, It must have been drugs. Back then it always was. But he surprised me.
“I went deaf.”
• • •
The Johnson Cats tour started in Bloomington—Circus One—then moved on to the Congress Theater in Oak Park. Small venues, warmup gigs with local ax-whackers to open. Then to Detroit, where the big stuff was scheduled to start: thirty cities, with Johnson Cats as the opening act for Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Arena rock, the real deal. What you dream of.
The ringing in Hugh’s ears started in Bloomington. At first he dismissed it as just part of the price you paid when you sold your soul for rock and roll—what self-respecting player didn’t suffer tinnitus from time to time? Look at Pete Townshend. Eric Clapton, Neil Young.